If someone didn't ask to hear from you yet, it doesn't mean they won't want to hear from you later. It's your job to prove to them -- through helpful content and valuable offers -- that they should stay up to date with your company via email. If you force your email content on anyone too early, even if you know in your bones they're a great fit for your products or services, you risk preemptively losing their trust and their future business.
I know a few of you just thought, “I cannot run my business like that”. So work with this. Instead of sending endless sale item emails, send just one “give” email a month. And what if you sent a really cool story of what someone has done with your products once a month? If you send weekly emails, just adding those two emails into the mix every month now means you’re on 1 to 1 schedule. Will your sales go down if you do this? Maybe a little. Will your engagement go up over time if you execute this well? Like a rocket ship.
Your social media strategy is more than just a Facebook profile or Twitter feed. When executed correctly, social media is a powerful customer engagement engine and web traffic driver. It’s easy to get sucked into the hype and create profiles on every single social site. This is the wrong approach. What you should do instead is to focus on a few key channels where your brand is most likely to reach key customers and prospects. This chapter will teach you how to make that judgment call.
As email marketing has blossomed and matured over the years, the terms email blast and e-blast have declined in popularity due to their negative connotations, being replaced with more palatable terms like newsletter or email campaign. And along with the new names have come innovations that allow marketers to create email blasts that are more personalized, better segmented, and thankfully less aggressive. We’ll talk about those innovations a little later.

But before any of you young guns scoff and discount the idea of a mail marketing campaign, you might want to read through this blog entry. Direct mail, while certainly a dinosaur in the world of marketing, can still be a powerful weapon in your arsenal – if it’s done correctly and intelligently, of course. We’ll lay out a few broad tips for you to consider if carrying out a direct mail campaign. While we would still urge the majority of business owners toward a more electronic/Internet based marketing strategy, you can still get solid results from direct mail.

Note: If you want to attach additional files, such as a .pdf, we recommend that you store these files on a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, and linking to these files within your blast. We do not support file attachments to an email blast as these file types tend to be larger, increasing your chances of triggering spam filters and preventing your blast from reaching your recipients.